Kevin Pietersen would prefer to be known simply as "KP" but it is a lucky man who can choose his nickname. In Pakistan he will always be known as the chicken man, a description coined on England's tour last winter when the hosts sought to undermine their most dangerous adversary with ridicule. Look how he walks, they said, and as for that hairstyle, it has to resemble a rooster's comb.

The chicken dance made its first appearance at the Faisalabad Test when Shoaib Akhtar celebrated Pietersen's dismissal by flapping his arms. Pietersen, who had made a hundred, had reason not to be overly concerned. The rooster's comb is a symbol of courage so he was not about to stop strutting. But he did change his hairstyle.

Yesterday the chicken impression reappeared in West Yorkshire, carried off with a flourish by Pakistan's leg-spinner Danish Kaneria after he had outsmarted the batsman with a succession of seductive slower balls followed by a quicker googly which sailed through the gate as he played across the line.

"He walks with his feathers out and tries to slog at the spinners," said Kaneria. "And I called him a chicken to annoy him. He wasn't going to boss me around."

It was a brief but compulsive contest. Pietersen faced nine balls from Kaneria and thrashed three for four. He whipped the first ball through square leg, long-armed another sweep from outside off stump and then nonchalantly picked off the first of the slower balls. After his first-innings century he did not much fancy playing himself in.

Faisal Iqbal, stationed at short leg, the man whose sledging had irked Pietersen in the first innings, would have felt vulnerable. The name of D Kaneria was about to be added to the list of slow bowlers who have perished in Headingley's spinners' graveyard.

But Pietersen's taste for one-upmanship automatically leaves him a little exposed. If he can fairly be compared to a cartoon chicken then it has to be Foghorn Leghorn, Warner Brother's Looney Tunes bird, which has the same overbearing attitude towards its adversaries. Certainly England's very own chicken man might have added the catchphrase - "I say, huh, what you doing there, boy?" - as Kaneria's googly thudded into his stumps.

An hour of Pietersen at his most destructive would have made the game safe. As it was, Pakistan were enlivened. When Chris Read entered at No7, England's lead was a precarious 225. Duncan Fletcher must have calculated England's dearth of lower-order runs, cast his mind back to the selectorial debate over whether Read or Geraint Jones should keep wicket and recognised that the crux of the matter lay before him.

Seventy-eight balls later, the coach stood with his jubilant England players and applauded Read's maiden Test half-century. In its way, it was as frenetic an innings as Pietersen's. Just as he did in the first innings, he got off the mark with an inside edge for four. Had luck not been with him he might have made a pair. Instead he has made 38 and 55, survived some hairy moments and approached the task with some panache.

Read is a more confident batsman these days. Having inside-edged Shahid Nazir for four, he then edged Mohammad Sami through the slips for another one, but still had the confidence to advance down the pitch to haul Kaneria for six. He likes to sit on the back foot and his drag-on against Sami was no surprise on an increasingly uneven surface.